Library Stuff

January Magazine – “Wow: do I ever feel like a dope. Library Lovers Month is nearly over and it just this minute sunk in that the future is now.”

ValleyWag – “HarperCollins is paying Nick Douglas a five-figure sum for Twitter Wit, a book of the Gawker alum’s favorite Twitter posts. Is getting paid for aggregating other people’s “tweets” as lazy as it sounds? Because it sounds somehow even lazier than making a book out of your mom’s email messages, a scheme hatched up, perhaps not coincidentally, by another Gawker writer.”

Reuters – “Cablevision Systems Corp plans to charge online readers of its Newsday newspaper, a move that would make it one of the first large U.S. papers to reverse a trend toward free Web readership. The paper said in a statement late on Thursday that it is in the process of transforming the site into a locally focused cable service.”

Oy!

Webware – “Gmail users can now select multiple attachments and add them simultaneously to an e-mail message. The new system simply opens your operating system’s file explorer, and supports selecting of multiple files at once. Best of all, it includes a status bar for each file as it uploads (just like Flickr’s Flash uploader does) to let you know how far along each file is. This can be comforting if you’re adding a file that’s close to Gmail’s 20MB attachment limit, since you can see something other than a spinning loading icon. It also warns you if you’re over the size limit before the files start moving, which is a nice touch.”

Oh thank goodness!!

Wired Campus – “In an effort to broaden access to its image archives, Oregon State University has become the first university to join Flickr Commons, a section of the popular photo-sharing service devoted to making historic images available to the public. “We’re always looking for new areas of engagement, new avenues for putting our materials out there,” said Tiah Edmunson-Morton, reference and instruction archivist at the university’s Valley Library, in an interview today. “It seemed a base to reach a whole new set of users.”

wtop.com – “A French professor at Goucher College who was barred from campus after officials learned of his genocide indictment in Rwanda will be allowed to use the school’s library. A college spokeswoman said Thursday that school President Sanford Ungar made the decision after receiving a petition signed by members of the campus community seeking to let Leopold Munyakazi (moon-yah-KAH’-zee) use the library.”

Associated Press – “There wasn’t a sales pitch. When Elie Wiesel met Bernard Madoff over dinner about 20 years ago, the topic of money never came up. They talked about history, education and Jewish philosophy, and the then-revered money manager urged Wiesel to leave his teaching post at Boston University and join a New York college.”

Willing Davidson – “Why does Hollywood take our favorite novels and turn them into crap? This isn’t an original complaint: Liking the book better than the movie is a middlebrow rite of passage. And novels are a constant, renewable source of stories for Hollywood, with ready-built brand appeal—from the kiddie franchises (Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Narnia) to the airport bangers (Da Vinci Code, the Bourne etceteras).” (via)

Library Journal – “The American Library Association (ALA), the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) said this week they will file an amicus brief pertaining to the pending Google Book Search settlement. ARL associate executive director Prue Adler told the LJ Academic Newswire the brief would be written by attorney Jonathan Band, author of the Guide for the Perplexed: Libraries and the Google Library Project Settlement, and would amplify for the court concerns library leaders voiced at recent meeting in Washington, DC.”